Jury finds Barefoot guilty of first-degree murder

Otha Ray Barefoot waits for his trial to begin on Monday at the Henderson County Courthouse. Barefoot is accused of killing Paul Allen Bradish at Smiley's Flea Market on Feb. 26, 2012. Barefoot was found guilty of first-degree murder by a jury on Thursday.

Published: Thursday, July 17, 2014 at 6:30 a.m.

Last Modified: Thursday, July 17, 2014 at 4:24 p.m.

After an hour of deliberation, a jury of six women and six men returned to the courtroom minutes before 4:30 p.m. Thursday and announced they had reached a verdict.

Tears fell on both sides of the aisle as the jury announced they had found 29-year-old Otha Ray Barefoot guilty of first-degree murder.

With his elbows on the defense table, Barefoot lowered and shook his head as the words hit him. He turned to his girlfriend and gave her the “I love you” sign, and to his parents he mouthed the words, “I love you.”

Barefoot's mother wept as Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Philip Ginn delivered the mandatory sentence for the crime – life in prison without the benefit of parole.

Barefoot was accused of shooting 59-year-old Paul Allen Bradish multiple times at Smiley's Flea Market on the morning of Feb. 26, 2012. He did not deny the shooting, but has claimed it was an act of self-defense fueled by constant bullying from Bradish.

'Very truthful'

Both sides rested their cases Thursday morning, after witnesses called by the defense revealed that Barefoot had asked for help in dealing with Bradish's behavior toward him months before Barefoot shot him.

In opening statements Tuesday, Barefoot's attorney, Mike Edney, painted Bradish as a bully who had constantly harassed and threatened his client.

In a video-taped confession shown to the court Wednesday, Barefoot told detectives he thought Bradish was coming over the table after him at the market that morning, and that's why he walked around his truck and retrieved his gun. He said he thought Bradish was going for a weapon in his pocket, so he started firing.

A medical examiner testified Tuesday that Bradish was struck five times and died from a fatal wound to the head.

Edney asked the court to allow jurors to closely examine the 52-year-old, .32 caliber revolver Barefoot admitted to using that day. Henderson County Sheriff's Office Detective Darrin Whitaker immobilized the weapon with a lock before the handgun was passed to the jury box.

Beginning the day with a cross-examination of Whitaker, the state's last witness, Edney asked the seasoned detective if others he had interviewed in the past talked as freely as Barefoot. He admitted that wasn't always the case.

Whitaker said Barefoot seemed to be “very truthful and very forthcoming.”

Edney said that in the video, Barefoot claimed he circled his truck before reaching inside its cab to get his gun and coming back to the table, right?

“Yes,” Whitaker said.

“So apparently all that time Paul (Bradish) and Donald (Mathis) stood there waiting on him or getting ready to do something, correct?” Edney asked.

“I don't know what they were doing,” Whitaker said. “Next time he saw them they were in front of the table.”

“They didn't leave,” Edney said.

“No,” Whitaker added.

Under a redirect examination, District Attorney Greg Newman asked Whitaker if Barefoot said he had told his parents that he was going to kill Bradish if the flea market didn't do anything.

“Yes,” he replied.

The state rested its case at 9:25 a.m. Edney asked the court to drop the murder charge down from first-degree or second-degree (requiring factors of premeditation, deliberation or malice) to voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.

Judge Philip Ginn denied the motion.

Cry for help

Barefoot, who was 26 at the time of the shooting, was living with his parents in Greer, S.C., when he started selling at local flea markets to make extra money.

After taking the stand as the first witness for the defense, Lena Mathis of Gaffney, S.C., said she witnessed the trouble Barefoot had with Bradish before the shooting.

Lena Mathis told the jury that she dated Barefoot from August to November 2011 and accompanied him on several trips to flea markets in Chesnee, S.C., and Smiley's in Fletcher.

“Me and Ray (Barefoot) went up there (to Smiley's) almost every weekend,” she said. Bradish “would come to Ray's table every morning.”

Barefoot and Bradish sold similar items, she said, and Bradish would often tell Barefoot his stuff was priced too high.

“It got to the point where he was raising Cain and cussing at Ray, disrespecting other people around us, disrespecting me,” she said. “I could barely go look anywhere else at the flea market without Ray telling me, 'stay close.' I was actually scared for myself, rather than Ray. It just got to the point where it became an every morning thing, all the time, and then it got worse from there.”

She said that one morning Bradish was leaving and he stopped at the end of the row and smirked at Barefoot before pulling off.

“He was a big guy,” she said of Bradish. “He just had that demeanor about him that I didn't really like.”

“Pushy?” Edney asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“A bully?”

“Yes,” she said.

Lena Mathis said that one morning Barefoot was selling knives at his table when Bradish walked up and pulled a knife from his pocket. “He said, 'This is my knife. You want to look at it? I carry this with me at all times,'” she told the jury.

Did he say that in such a manner as to intimidate? Edney asked.

“Yes,” she said.

Lena Mathis said she heard Bradish threaten to kill Barefoot and didn't think he was joking.

Barefoot, she said, “won't hurt anybody unless you push him to that point. He's got a good heart.”

Under cross-examination, Lena Mathis said they reached out for help filing a report with the Henderson County Sheriff's Office about Bradish's harassment. She told the jury that a uniformed officer came by the flea market to speak with them.

“We had told him about Paul (Bradish) coming to Ray's table and threatening him,” she testified. She described the officer to the court, but couldn't remember his name beyond "Steven."

In later testimony, Barefoot's mother, Irene Barefoot, testified to calling Smiley's Flea Market on two occasions to report the harassment and threats, asking them to keep Bradish away from her son.

But the complaints didn't stop Lena Mathis and Ray Barefoot from returning to Smiley's, nor did they keep Bradish away.

Were you surprised Ray Barefoot kept going back to Smiley's?, Newman asked.

“I'm not surprised,” Lena Mathis said. “That's where he made his best money.”

Ray Barefoot's father, Sheldon Barefoot, told the jury that when his son would return from Smiley's, he would “come home complaining about Paul Bradish… I told Ray, 'You sit at your table and leave that man alone.”

Sheldon and Irene Barefoot were at Myrtle Beach in October 2011 when Ray Barefoot called them asking for the phone number of a cousin, who works with the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. Sheldon Barefoot said his son was hoping the cousin could persuade Smiley's to keep Bradish away from him.

The call prompted Irene Barefoot's first call to Smiley's, Sheldon Barefoot said. “His momma called Smiley's Flea Market twice to do something about it, but they never did something about it, so this is the way it wound up,” he told the jury.

“I was raised not to go looking for trouble,” Sheldon Barefoot added. “I tried to give him the best advice like my daddy gave me.”

Sheldon Barefoot said he went with his son to Smiley's one day and Ray Barefoot pointed Bradish out to him and said, “'Daddy, that man is the one giving me that trouble.' I said, 'Well, you leave that man alone.'”

“Ray (Barefoot) was scared,” he said. “You back a scared man in a corner, you're going to get killed.”

Both parents were quizzed under cross-examination about phone conversations and letters they had with Ray Barefoot in jail. Newman asked Sheldon Barefoot if he recalled his son saying Bradish and Donald Mathis “were slow to walk, but he was quick to draw.”

He didn't remember.

Assistant District Attorney Doug Mundy asked Irene Barefoot if she remembered her son asking, “Didn't they find a weapon on the man I shot?”

“I may have, I don't remember,” she said. “I remember him telling me that he (Bradish) kept pulling at his pockets and he wasn't taking a chance on him killing him."

Mundy asked if she remembered telling her son that Bradish's hands could have been deadly weapons.

“We may have talked about that. We talked about a lot of things,” she said. “It's been two years. You can't recollect a lot of things in detail.”

In a video-taped confession, Barefoot told detectives that Bradish had been pushing his buttons for months. Minutes after 7 a.m. on Feb. 26, he said Bradish had threatened him and it looked like Bradish was coming over the table to get him when Barefoot walked around his truck and reached inside the cab to get his gun.

Barefoot said that he thought Bradish was going for a weapon in his pockets, so he shot him five times.

The prosecution argued the act was anything but self-defense since Bradish had no weapon and at no time tried to take a swing at Barefoot the morning he was shot. They said that eyewitnesses to the crime testified Bradish was not going over the table.

Assistant District Attorney Doug Mundy asked the jury to remember the testimony of a Smiley's vendor named Richard Case. “He said he heard five or six shots. He saw Mr. Bradish go down and he saw the defendant leaning over the table and shooting him some more – leaning over the table,” Mundy said.

He asked the jury to recall Duane Anderson and how he heard a bang that morning. “He said it wasn't like in the movies. He said he saw the defendant take a couple of steps toward the victim… and shot again,” Mundy told the jury. “He said that Mr. Bradish had his hands in his pockets and pulled them out going 'Quit!' 'Stop!' But what does he do? He keeps killing him.”

Mundy argued the two men were competitors mixed up in a game of trash talk. He reminded the jury of Barefoot's video confession.

Barefoot “said, 'They came up to my table… cutting up, laughing.' It's not like they're heading down the street with two six-shooters on their side going, 'Where's Mr. Barefoot?' No. No,” Mundy said. It was “a bunch of talk… Only that particular day, Mr. Barefoot had been thinking about it just like … he told his family, 'If the flea market doesn't take care of this, I'm going to kill him.' That's called premeditation. That's deliberation.”

When Bradish and his friend, Donald Mathis, approached his tables that morning, Barefoot told police that he asked Bradish, “What are you smiling at?”

“Did he not think that was going to provoke a response that was going to be some more trash talk? Of course he did,” Mundy said. “That doesn't sound like somebody who is terrified, who is threatened.”

Defense attorney Mike Edney asked the jury to see the confrontation through Barefoot's eyes. "You've got to get into what he was thinking, into what he was seeing," he said.

He asked the jury, If you perceive a guy is coming over the table to kill you, what would you do?

Edney said Bradish would pick at Barefoot constantly, cuss at him, threaten him and even showed him a knife to intimidate him. He said Bradish used Donald Mathis to stir him up one day.

Bullies “pick targets out,” Edney said, adding Bradish picked out Barefoot because he thought he could get away with it and if he could make Barefoot leave the market he, could get rid of his competition.

“Ray is enough of a good ol' boy and a redneck never to admit he's scared,” Edney said, but added his own father said he was scared. If the jury had to find him guilty, he asked them to find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.

In a final closing, District Attorney Greg Newman said manslaughter was out of the question. Vying for a first-degree verdict, which requires premeditation, deliberation and malice, Newman reminded the jury of the incriminating “smirk.”

David Brooks, a vendor who was having a Moonpie breakfast at his table directly across the aisle from tables 13 and 14 where Barefoot was setting up, told the jury he saw Barefoot move toward Bradish as he shot him.

“Mr. Brooks told you as he's standing there eating a Moonpie that he sees Mr. Bradish get shot, sees him go down and the defendant coming after him, reaching over the table and finishing him off by shooting him in the head. And this shows the cool state of mind. This is evidence of deliberation: the defendant looks up at Mr. Brooks, who was right there on top of him, and he smirks,” Newman said.

“It's almost like we're in the wild days of the old west, shooting him right there in front of God, country and everybody,” Newman said. “It happened on a Sunday morning, in a public place.”

“The law gives you the right to defend yourself, but the bottom line is this, you cannot use excessive force. Period,” Newman said. “Mr. Bradish had no weapon. He was defenseless.”

<p>After an hour of deliberation, a jury of six women and six men returned to the courtroom minutes before 4:30 p.m. Thursday and announced they had reached a verdict.</p><p>Tears fell on both sides of the aisle as the jury announced they had found 29-year-old Otha Ray Barefoot guilty of first-degree murder.</p><p>With his elbows on the defense table, Barefoot lowered and shook his head as the words hit him. He turned to his girlfriend and gave her the “I love you” sign, and to his parents he mouthed the words, “I love you.”</p><p>Barefoot's mother wept as Senior Resident Superior Court Judge Philip Ginn delivered the mandatory sentence for the crime – life in prison without the benefit of parole.</p><p>Barefoot was accused of shooting 59-year-old Paul Allen Bradish multiple times at Smiley's Flea Market on the morning of Feb. 26, 2012. He did not deny the shooting, but has claimed it was an act of self-defense fueled by constant bullying from Bradish.</p><p><b>'Very truthful'</b></p><p>Both sides rested their cases Thursday morning, after witnesses called by the defense revealed that Barefoot had asked for help in dealing with Bradish's behavior toward him months before Barefoot shot him.</p><p>In opening statements Tuesday, Barefoot's attorney, Mike Edney, painted Bradish as a bully who had constantly harassed and threatened his client.</p><p>In a video-taped confession shown to the court Wednesday, Barefoot told detectives he thought Bradish was coming over the table after him at the market that morning, and that's why he walked around his truck and retrieved his gun. He said he thought Bradish was going for a weapon in his pocket, so he started firing.</p><p>A medical examiner testified Tuesday that Bradish was struck five times and died from a fatal wound to the head.</p><p>Edney asked the court to allow jurors to closely examine the 52-year-old, .32 caliber revolver Barefoot admitted to using that day. Henderson County Sheriff's Office Detective Darrin Whitaker immobilized the weapon with a lock before the handgun was passed to the jury box.</p><p>Beginning the day with a cross-examination of Whitaker, the state's last witness, Edney asked the seasoned detective if others he had interviewed in the past talked as freely as Barefoot. He admitted that wasn't always the case.</p><p>Whitaker said Barefoot seemed to be “very truthful and very forthcoming.”</p><p>Edney said that in the video, Barefoot claimed he circled his truck before reaching inside its cab to get his gun and coming back to the table, right?</p><p>“Yes,” Whitaker said.</p><p>“So apparently all that time Paul (Bradish) and Donald (Mathis) stood there waiting on him or getting ready to do something, correct?” Edney asked.</p><p>“I don't know what they were doing,” Whitaker said. “Next time he saw them they were in front of the table.”</p><p>“They didn't leave,” Edney said.</p><p>“No,” Whitaker added.</p><p>Under a redirect examination, District Attorney Greg Newman asked Whitaker if Barefoot said he had told his parents that he was going to kill Bradish if the flea market didn't do anything.</p><p>“Yes,” he replied.</p><p>The state rested its case at 9:25 a.m. Edney asked the court to drop the murder charge down from first-degree or second-degree (requiring factors of premeditation, deliberation or malice) to voluntary or involuntary manslaughter.</p><p>Judge Philip Ginn denied the motion.</p><p> </p><p><b>Cry for help</b></p><p>Barefoot, who was 26 at the time of the shooting, was living with his parents in Greer, S.C., when he started selling at local flea markets to make extra money.</p><p>After taking the stand as the first witness for the defense, Lena Mathis of Gaffney, S.C., said she witnessed the trouble Barefoot had with Bradish before the shooting.</p><p>Lena Mathis told the jury that she dated Barefoot from August to November 2011 and accompanied him on several trips to flea markets in Chesnee, S.C., and Smiley's in Fletcher. </p><p>“Me and Ray (Barefoot) went up there (to Smiley's) almost every weekend,” she said. Bradish “would come to Ray's table every morning.”</p><p>Barefoot and Bradish sold similar items, she said, and Bradish would often tell Barefoot his stuff was priced too high.</p><p>“It got to the point where he was raising Cain and cussing at Ray, disrespecting other people around us, disrespecting me,” she said. “I could barely go look anywhere else at the flea market without Ray telling me, 'stay close.' I was actually scared for myself, rather than Ray. It just got to the point where it became an every morning thing, all the time, and then it got worse from there.”</p><p>She said that one morning Bradish was leaving and he stopped at the end of the row and smirked at Barefoot before pulling off.</p><p>“He was a big guy,” she said of Bradish. “He just had that demeanor about him that I didn't really like.”</p><p>“Pushy?” Edney asked.</p><p>“Yes,” she replied.</p><p>“A bully?”</p><p>“Yes,” she said.</p><p>Lena Mathis said that one morning Barefoot was selling knives at his table when Bradish walked up and pulled a knife from his pocket. “He said, 'This is my knife. You want to look at it? I carry this with me at all times,'” she told the jury.</p><p>Did he say that in such a manner as to intimidate? Edney asked.</p><p>“Yes,” she said.</p><p>Lena Mathis said she heard Bradish threaten to kill Barefoot and didn't think he was joking.</p><p>Barefoot, she said, “won't hurt anybody unless you push him to that point. He's got a good heart.”</p><p>Under cross-examination, Lena Mathis said they reached out for help filing a report with the Henderson County Sheriff's Office about Bradish's harassment. She told the jury that a uniformed officer came by the flea market to speak with them.</p><p>“We had told him about Paul (Bradish) coming to Ray's table and threatening him,” she testified. She described the officer to the court, but couldn't remember his name beyond "Steven."</p><p>In later testimony, Barefoot's mother, Irene Barefoot, testified to calling Smiley's Flea Market on two occasions to report the harassment and threats, asking them to keep Bradish away from her son.</p><p>But the complaints didn't stop Lena Mathis and Ray Barefoot from returning to Smiley's, nor did they keep Bradish away.</p><p>Were you surprised Ray Barefoot kept going back to Smiley's?, Newman asked.</p><p>“I'm not surprised,” Lena Mathis said. “That's where he made his best money.”</p><p>Ray Barefoot's father, Sheldon Barefoot, told the jury that when his son would return from Smiley's, he would “come home complaining about Paul Bradish… I told Ray, 'You sit at your table and leave that man alone.”</p><p>Sheldon and Irene Barefoot were at Myrtle Beach in October 2011 when Ray Barefoot called them asking for the phone number of a cousin, who works with the North Carolina State Highway Patrol. Sheldon Barefoot said his son was hoping the cousin could persuade Smiley's to keep Bradish away from him.</p><p>The call prompted Irene Barefoot's first call to Smiley's, Sheldon Barefoot said. “His momma called Smiley's Flea Market twice to do something about it, but they never did something about it, so this is the way it wound up,” he told the jury.</p><p>“I was raised not to go looking for trouble,” Sheldon Barefoot added. “I tried to give him the best advice like my daddy gave me.”</p><p>Sheldon Barefoot said he went with his son to Smiley's one day and Ray Barefoot pointed Bradish out to him and said, “'Daddy, that man is the one giving me that trouble.' I said, 'Well, you leave that man alone.'”</p><p>“Ray (Barefoot) was scared,” he said. “You back a scared man in a corner, you're going to get killed.”</p><p>Both parents were quizzed under cross-examination about phone conversations and letters they had with Ray Barefoot in jail. Newman asked Sheldon Barefoot if he recalled his son saying Bradish and Donald Mathis “were slow to walk, but he was quick to draw.”</p><p>He didn't remember.</p><p>Assistant District Attorney Doug Mundy asked Irene Barefoot if she remembered her son asking, “Didn't they find a weapon on the man I shot?”</p><p>“I may have, I don't remember,” she said. “I remember him telling me that he (Bradish) kept pulling at his pockets and he wasn't taking a chance on him killing him."</p><p>Mundy asked if she remembered telling her son that Bradish's hands could have been deadly weapons.</p><p>“We may have talked about that. We talked about a lot of things,” she said. “It's been two years. You can't recollect a lot of things in detail.”</p><p> </p><p><b>Like days in the Wild West</b></p><p>Around 2 p.m., prosecutors asked the jury to find Barefoot guilty of first-degree murder.</p><p>In a video-taped confession, Barefoot told detectives that Bradish had been pushing his buttons for months. Minutes after 7 a.m. on Feb. 26, he said Bradish had threatened him and it looked like Bradish was coming over the table to get him when Barefoot walked around his truck and reached inside the cab to get his gun.</p><p>Barefoot said that he thought Bradish was going for a weapon in his pockets, so he shot him five times.</p><p>The prosecution argued the act was anything but self-defense since Bradish had no weapon and at no time tried to take a swing at Barefoot the morning he was shot. They said that eyewitnesses to the crime testified Bradish was not going over the table.</p><p>Assistant District Attorney Doug Mundy asked the jury to remember the testimony of a Smiley's vendor named Richard Case. “He said he heard five or six shots. He saw Mr. Bradish go down and he saw the defendant leaning over the table and shooting him some more – leaning over the table,” Mundy said.</p><p>He asked the jury to recall Duane Anderson and how he heard a bang that morning. “He said it wasn't like in the movies. He said he saw the defendant take a couple of steps toward the victim… and shot again,” Mundy told the jury. “He said that Mr. Bradish had his hands in his pockets and pulled them out going 'Quit!' 'Stop!' But what does he do? He keeps killing him.”</p><p>Mundy argued the two men were competitors mixed up in a game of trash talk. He reminded the jury of Barefoot's video confession.</p><p>Barefoot “said, 'They came up to my table… cutting up, laughing.' It's not like they're heading down the street with two six-shooters on their side going, 'Where's Mr. Barefoot?' No. No,” Mundy said. It was “a bunch of talk… Only that particular day, Mr. Barefoot had been thinking about it just like … he told his family, 'If the flea market doesn't take care of this, I'm going to kill him.' That's called premeditation. That's deliberation.”</p><p>When Bradish and his friend, Donald Mathis, approached his tables that morning, Barefoot told police that he asked Bradish, “What are you smiling at?”</p><p>“Did he not think that was going to provoke a response that was going to be some more trash talk? Of course he did,” Mundy said. “That doesn't sound like somebody who is terrified, who is threatened.”</p><p>Defense attorney Mike Edney asked the jury to see the confrontation through Barefoot's eyes. "You've got to get into what he was thinking, into what he was seeing," he said.</p><p>He asked the jury, If you perceive a guy is coming over the table to kill you, what would you do?</p><p>Edney said Bradish would pick at Barefoot constantly, cuss at him, threaten him and even showed him a knife to intimidate him. He said Bradish used Donald Mathis to stir him up one day.</p><p>Bullies “pick targets out,” Edney said, adding Bradish picked out Barefoot because he thought he could get away with it and if he could make Barefoot leave the market he, could get rid of his competition.</p><p>“Ray is enough of a good ol' boy and a redneck never to admit he's scared,” Edney said, but added his own father said he was scared. If the jury had to find him guilty, he asked them to find him guilty of voluntary manslaughter.</p><p>In a final closing, District Attorney Greg Newman said manslaughter was out of the question. Vying for a first-degree verdict, which requires premeditation, deliberation and malice, Newman reminded the jury of the incriminating “smirk.”</p><p>David Brooks, a vendor who was having a Moonpie breakfast at his table directly across the aisle from tables 13 and 14 where Barefoot was setting up, told the jury he saw Barefoot move toward Bradish as he shot him.</p><p>“Mr. Brooks told you as he's standing there eating a Moonpie that he sees Mr. Bradish get shot, sees him go down and the defendant coming after him, reaching over the table and finishing him off by shooting him in the head. And this shows the cool state of mind. This is evidence of deliberation: the defendant looks up at Mr. Brooks, who was right there on top of him, and he smirks,” Newman said.</p><p>“It's almost like we're in the wild days of the old west, shooting him right there in front of God, country and everybody,” Newman said. “It happened on a Sunday morning, in a public place.”</p><p>“The law gives you the right to defend yourself, but the bottom line is this, you cannot use excessive force. Period,” Newman said. “Mr. Bradish had no weapon. He was defenseless.”</p><p>Reach Weaver at Emily.weaver@blueridgenow.com or 828-694-7867.</p>